Trinity: A Mindset & Strategic Approach

Some of you have heard me speak at a conference, I always have a deep passion and excitement when I talk about the “Trinity”. I wax and wane about it and go on and on about how fantastic the “Trinity” is.

But it took a comment from Lisa Seaman to make me realize that I had not written about the “Trinity” on this blog. So Lisa asks wisely: “I’m not sure I ever got what the “Trinity” is.” My fault Lisa, here’s a post just for you. : )

A couple of years ago we were grappling with the challenges of “web analytics” : ) and how to solve them. My thinking about web analytics at that time was that the traditional way of doing it was very much dead. So what is the solution?

After a few days of thinking a “new” way of thinking about decision making on the web coalesced. The output was this little slide with three core components. That “mindset” got the name Trinity.

Trinity also became the moniker that was given to the strategic approach that was applied in order to build out a world-class web decision making platform.

At the center of the Trinity is the reason it exists:

The goal of the Trinity mindset is to power the generation of actionable insights. Its goal is not to do reporting. Its goal is not to figure out how to spam decision makers with data. Actionable Insights & Metrics are the uber-goal simply because they drive strategic differentiation and a sustainable competitive advantage.

The first component of the Trinity mindset is Behavior analysis, what we traditionally consider clickstream data analysis.

We collect all the clickstream data and the objective is to analyze it from a higher plane of reference. No more measuring HITS. Do Click Density analysis, massive segmentation, search (both internal and external). The objective is to get really smart about clickstream analysis and get to really truly inferring the intent of our site visitors.

People usually expect too much of the clickstream data. The best we can do with clickstream data is infer intent, and we have to make peace with it.

The second component of the Trinity mindset is Outcomes analysis. I fondly call it the “so what” element.

This is critical for one simple reason, at the end of the day when all is said and done what was the outcome for the customer and the company.

I encourage you to ask a simple question to the site owners: Why does your website exist? (You might be surprised how many can’t answer that question quickly.) This element of the Trinity exists to measure how well is the website doing in meeting the goal of its existence.

In the simplest of terms this is measure Revenue for ecommerce websites (not just how much but also why did we make as much as we did) and measuring Conversion Rates smarter. But for support websites this is measuring Problem Resolution and Timeliness.

Every website should have a clearly articulated outcome, if you don’t have the capacity to measure all nuances of outcomes the recommendation is to give up on measuring Behavior (clickstream) all together. Why sink time into that? A bit extreme? Yes. Necessary? You bet your bottom.

The third component of the Trinity mindset is Experience. Think of it as “why did they behave the way they did!!”.

This is perhaps the most critical element to me, if I had to pick just one element (and it is hard to choose amongst your children : )) I would pick Experience. This is us attempting to get into the head of our customer. This is the Why. This is the warm hug when you are stymied and tortured by your clickstream data and you want to tear your hair out.

There are many different ways to understand the experience of customers on your website. There are surveys you can do. I am a huge believer of experimentation and testing (let’s have the customers tell us what they prefer). Doing Lab Usability testing is another great option. We love Follow Me Homes, a concept advocated by Scott Cook the founder of Intuit under his impactful Customer Driven Innovation mindset.

All these experience methodologies decked against one single purpose: Getting companies to listen to the Voice of Customer.

Now we can assemble the three components and the core center and voila you get Trinity:

The Trinity mindset empowers you to Understand the customer experience so explicitly that you can influence the right customer behavior which will lead to win-win outcomes for the company and its customers.

That last part is important: Trinity aims for win-win.

If the right version version of the product for you is Basic and not Premier then our job as site owners is for us to help you figure that out and buy Basic. We could make more money in the short term if you buy Premier today. But you will get it, use it, get frustrated as it is too advanced for you and you’ll never buy from us again. But if we help you buy the right for you version Basic then next year you’ll be back for Premier. Trinity aims to solve for the long term.

So there you go, it is just that simple. : ) [Lisa does it make sense now?]

Each element of the Trinity is supported by a tool and different methodologies and sustainable processes and, most importantly, key people skills. Just having the mindset does not solve the problem (though I guarantee it will put you on the right path). Executing on the Trinity strategic approach means creating the right organization structure and a move evolved culture. But these are all topics for a future post.

What do you think? Do you agree with the Trinity mindset? Too complex? Perhaps too simple? Is your website leadership executing against such a mindset? Please share your feedback via comments.

Comments

This is a nice way of thinking but I think that it is too simplistic for some types of websites (namely membership-based websites with long life cycles). This approach is very session centric and assumes that a user's relationship with your site can be broken down and understood in the context of a single session rather than their ongoing history with your website. That type of thinking is fine for ecommerce, support, and some content sites because you can think very narrowly (i.e. this person came to my site with a purpose in mind and because they clicked on this link that means they were trying to complete this goal and if they did not complete that one goal in this session, then we were not successful).

Lately, I have been trying to point out that when working on websites with long life cycles, you need to take an approach where session based analysis matters less because you are working from hundreds of sessions per user. I think that while the Trinity mindset is a great approach for websites with short or infrequent lifecycles and certainly moves us past an unactionable hits and impressions POV, it is not for all types of websites and should be prefaced as such. With the rise of membership-based websites (thanks web 2.0), I think that it becomes necessary to indicate what type of site a particular mindset or approach works best for.

Otherwise a great post. I think it is important for every analyst or analytics group to have a guiding mindset.

Chris: You take ecommerce sites, support sites and "some" content sites out and what do you really have left on the web? A few "small" web 2.0 sites, who really cares!! : ) I am of course absolutely kidding, had to pull your leg. : )

You are right about session based thinking, waaaayyy to limiting. But there is nothing in the Trinity mindset that encourages just session based analysis. Most powerful insightful analysis, regardless of purpose of site, is pan-session analysis. (I have a post coming on two such metrics on Monday.)

Trinity is a mindset and a way of thinking. "Don't get stuck in clickstream tools and expect insights, drive yourself to have a robust and deep understanding of outcomes and by God if you are not into understanding customer experience hard core then you are not going to get a competitive advantage on the web."

Even if you dip your little toe into this mindset you will very quickly leave "individual sessions" mindset behind because Trinity encourages broader and more holistic thinking and puts "customer" experience (pan-session if you will) first.

Great post. I would argue that the "so what" is the last step in the process.

Thus, presenting the issue in this order:

1. What's happening
2. Why is it happening
3. So what?

leads directly and without any hard leaps in logic to the most important question, namely,

What are we going to do about it?

This could be exactly what you mean, but by referring to the Outcomes as "so what" I get a bit confused when you jump back to "why".

Just my $0.02.

Meanwhile,

If you haven't already looked at it, you might enjoy Barbara Minto's book, The Pyramid Principle. I had the opportunity to attend a multi day training with her personally when I worked for a previous employer. I can see that you would very much understand and agree with her approach to logic in speaking and writing. :)

Our Trinity here is Behavioral Analysis, Attitudinal Analysis, and Testing. I always thought of the latter as being in response of what we discoved in the first two, so I never felt 100% comfortable with making it the third pole.

I like your second one, "Outcome", even though it is still pretty much bahavioral, but at least it has the merit of distinguishing amongst behaviors (here put as "valuable actions" I would say).

From what I have been reading lately, it seems that the Web Intelligence/Insights field is on the verge of producing its Novum Organum… Keep up the good work!

Is it really possible to influence outcomes without understanding why things are happening? Is it that my 1&2 are combined as sub headings under your 1?

If that's a correct assessment, I respectfully suggest that trinity's not the right word for what you're talking about. Calling these a trinity (definition: the sum of one and one and one, e.g. all equal), and representing these concepts as a 2-d triangle implies that there are equal relationships between the three concepts, all equally important. In reality that is not true of course, because there are dependencies here. One must understand customers before making decisions, etc.

A couple of ideas with the goal of making the relationships between these concepts more obvious visually: Perhaps This is more like a circle, the classic continuous improvement cycle of measure, test, measure, iterate, ad infinitum; or a pyramid, where the base is understand experience (i.e. What happened and why?) and then make changes, get results.

I offer these suggestions because I'm a huge fan of your posts on selling your ideas interally so I suspect you'll appreciate the nuances of this kind of discussion. If not, just tell me to bug off. :)

Melinda: Your challenge to my response to my challenge to your response has challenged me to think. Nice. :) [Oh and I would never tell any of our small band of merry readers to bug off, that would not be accretive to the quality of the conversation here. So do please bug.]
Short Answer:

I understand completely your point on using the continuous improvement cycle visual or the pyramid (this one is a bit more compelling). But it’s the “equal-ness” yet dependent existence that seems to keep me away from the pyramid.

Long Answer (to your multi-faceted question):

Here is the first line of a wikipedia article that comes close to why I might have choosen the name: The word "Trinity" comes from "Trinitas", a Latin abstract noun that most literally means "three-ness" (or "the property of occurring three at once").

I do believe that while there are dependencies between each, and there are very strong ones, these three are equally important and exist all at the same time and they can’t be silos.

I’ll give you an example: In our case we can measure Customer Satisfaction and if we are increasing “Net Promoter” or “likelihood to buy” over time and that in of itself is valuable and golden (because if you are not doing well the open ended VOC will be illuminating). But we can also take all the “unhappy” people (low CS) and see what they did on the website by using ClickTracks (behavior) or measure Navigation or Content ratings for people who buy different products (outcomes).

On your other point…..

In my mind Behavior is mostly your "what's happening" and just a smidgen of "why it is happen".

Experience is mostly "why it is happening". You can get some causality of Why from ClickStream or Outcomes but the Why I am interested in, and advocating, has all to do with people and perceptions and their needs and complex reactions etc. So the Why is almost all Experience in the Trinity.

Another great post Avinash! You make me want to go back and re-think how I do analysis for IBM and my other clients. I am really glad I read your blog as there's stuff I get here that I don't get in anyone else's approach.

Using Trinity is a very helpful way to represent what is happening on site and what it means. While your talking about segmenting traffic to the nth degree, Trinity is a segmentation, it and of itself, your putting certain parts of web analysis and insight into one leg of the triange, and some in another. In that sense, Melinda's comments are also valid.

Aside from what type of site you have, or if sessions are the right way to measure interaction, it's more likely than not that most sites will not have all the tools needed to do all three parts of the Trinity equally as well.

For my current employer, I don't think we do step 3 as well as we could, and I think our web analytics hampers us for step 1.

Sure, Trinity is an ideal, after all, I know that, but we don't have all the right tools to get to the Trinity approach and make it fully work – the way you have outlined it. I wish I could make bread out of water and make analytics out of nothingness – but if you don't have the right tools and there right organizational setup – the Trinity approach is going to be very hard to actualize, analysts will have to work it out, for themselves, as best they can. That's what I do.

What this post reminds me of is that the journey is the goal. You know, from geometry that if you have two sides of a triange you can get the third side by induction (if that's the right term – it's been a long time since 9th grade Geometry). As long as your analysing web experience as Trinity, get two sides and you figure out the third. Here's what I mean – but maybe my approach is a bit simplistic

case 1: You have ClickStream analysis plus Customer Satisfaction (but you don't know how many orders you got)(that's hard to imagine, btw). Can you figure out the order part, pull it out of the analytics somehow? Probably.

case 2: You have Clickstream Analysis/segmentation and the number of orders but no survey data on customer satisfaction – can you derive that from the analytics and customer behavior on your site? Probably.

A lot of times, just organizing your experience will create the questions and the answers – that's been my experience.

Marshall: I partly agree with you. You are thinking of Pythagoras' theorem, which states that for any right angle triangle:

a2 + b2 = c2

where a and b are the two sides of the right angle triangle. Of course if you know c and b you can compute a and so on.

But in the Trinity there is one absolutely necessary part of the "triangle" (where a Pythagoras' theorem type inspiration won't apply).

You are right, if you have Experience and Outcomes I think you can live without Behaviour (sub-optimal but you can).

If you have Experience and Behaviour you can hypothesize that if those two are doing great then Outcomes must be good as well (again sub optimal but if clickstream is good and Customer Satisfaction is high then sales have to be high, or atleast normal).

But if you have Behaviour and Outcomes then you can't say for sure that Experience is ok. For one simple reason: With 2 to 3% conversion rate Outcomes represents a minority of site visitors and with the limitations of clickstream data you won't really know that you are solving for all your customer segments (that you have high Customer Satisfaction across all customer segments and high Net Promoter scores).

So Experience is absolutely killer and if I had to pick only one element of the trinity to have that would be it.

Great discussion. I think the WebMetricsGuru says it best…"it's not a perfect analogy." I see where you're coming from, but the triangle choice may confuse some of your audience. So you make want to take some time to explain what you mean by this in the preso.

I say this because while I might agree that the trinity is an excellent goal, it will never happen all at once in reality, and there is a process to follow in looking at the data. If one was going to start building this trinity from scratch in a comopany, one would have to start somewhere–all parts of this triangle are not equally important all at once.

Of course given my questions, I should present a better analogy, but so far I am coming up blank and I apologize for that. But I have a feeling that you'll chew on this feedback and find something even more compelling, or compliment it with a brief explanation in the presentation.

Your blog is incredible, by the way, I'm so glad someone is thinking about these issues at a high level. I really appreciate your insights.

Hmm, this discussion is becoming a classical example of epistemology. Let us not take the model for the object! For example, I see behavioral/web analytics and attitudinal/Experience analytics as different dimensions of the same thing; conceptualizing them seperately and representing them in a model/geometric form is just a tool. In my case, I represent those analytical dimensions as pieces of a pie (ah! again unable to escape from a visual representation!).
Anyway, my point is that I do not believe analyzing the Experience (motivations, satisfaction, purposes, etc.) is optional to the behavioral analysis; it is mandatory to conduct both. Simpy put, I am afraid that such a model would suggest that sny of its part is optional.

[…] The hardest thing you’ll do in your life as a Web Gal / Guy / Marketer / Analyst / Researcher / Jack is identify what constitutes success for you when it comes to measuring Outcomes for your website. […]

You need to be able to track social media effectively for client showcasing and its effectiveness for traffic/links/sales (if any)/ and mainly branding i.e how many times its mentioned in good circles.

As a newbie to the UX field, I am seeing firsthand how this concept is changing my field. I myself, specialize in UX and SEO because the 2 disciplines truly complement each other, and not to use them together is a critical mistake in developing and executing business strategies as they relate to web activities.

Please check out my blog on this very subject. I cited you as a primary resource in my article, so I would be honored to get any feedback from you! quotient.net/blog/2012/6/25/converging-user-experience-design-with-a-seo-strategy/

Trackbacks

Avinash Kaushik has another great post on how to approach web analytics that just Wow'd me, make you want to think. You need to read Avinash's post yourself – I'm not going to rehash it here. However, I did……

We don't really ask that much of our web analytics software. Just tell us what's happening on our websites and what we should do about it. Count what people do, tally it up, create pretty little tables and graphs for……

[…]
The paradigm Avinash presents is a comprehensive view of the web by looking at action plus motivation. That occurs by hearing from visitors through more direct and active methods such as surveys or more passively through A / B testing. Analyzing that information alongside more traditional web data helps you understand why visitors take certain actions on your site.

That's a neat little framework — his Trinity mindset. But we must not forget Avinash's ultimate goal — to achieve better results on the web. More leads, higher conversion rates, and greater revenue; these are just some of the real metrics for measuring website effectiveness (especially from an executive perspective).
[…]

[…] To increase the chance of Halo 3’s success, Microsoft and Bungie put the game through a regimen that will sound familiar to web analytics 2.0 devotees. They emphasized behavior, outcomes and the voice of the customer. Week after week, they combined direct observation and think out loud user testing with analysis of recurrent dead-ends in gameplay. And while typical lab testing often relies on small sample sizes, the Halo 3 team analyzed over 3,000 hours of game play played by 600 gamers—and that's all prelaunch! […]

[…]
1. Web analytics is an excellent way to unobtrusively learn more about our students’ learning that is particularly suited to the medium.
2. Analytics can tell us what and how: what students are doing online (while logged into the content) and how they are using that content. We can “see” without actually observing them while they click.
3. Because our work is for required courses and students have an incentive to master the content in order to pass the course as well as end-of-program qualifying/certifying exams, “intent” is not an issue – as is currently discussed in the analytics literature. And “conversion rates” are more about achievement of learning outcomes on short and longer term exam/program outcomes – not on short-term purchasing decisions.
4. We can use the Trinity framework to assess our multimedia course designs and possibly (I hope) student learning outcomes.
[…]

We're having a bit of a measurement week here at Media Bullseye, with running a post from Jason Falls on this same subject yesterday, today I noticed this excellent offering from Kami Huyse. Kami covers the three essentials of measuring social media: interest, actions, and attitudes. "Sticking with things that are musical, when I talk about which things are measurable I break out my Triad of Measurement analogy (which is adapted from Avinash Kaushik's strategic concept of Trinity and Katie Paine's idea of measuring Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes)."

[…]
We came across an interesting post earlier in the week at Liberate Media, and as the focus of my new blog is measurement, i won out in the race to post about it.

The Triad mention in my headline is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the idea behind Kami Huyse’s Triad of Measurement analogy, which is adapted from Avinash Kaushik’s strategic concept of Trinity and Katie Paine’s idea of measuring Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes, is far from it.

In fact, it’s one of most simple, and therefore potentially powerful, measurement ideas that we’ve come across, and we really like it.
[…]

[…]
When I met the now legendary Avinash Kaushik for the first time at the Google Mountain View campus in November of 2007, I brought along my copy of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day for him to sign. I was very shy to bust it out in a room of over 100 people, but I finally got the guts and asked him to sign it, which he did! Now the question is: how much is a signed copy of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day worth on eBay?

The signature, much to the disbelief of every one of my co-workers here at MoreVisibility, does not say “To my #1 biggest fan of all time!”. Instead, a much more valuable, two line exclamation is found: “Trinity Rocks!”. Sorry Tigers, but Avinash was referring to his Trinity Strategy, not the University located in Texas.
[…]

[…] So personally I am excited. But I am also aware that Sitecatalyst is no panacea no matter how good it is. I am a firm believer of Avinash’s trinity strategy and I think we are far away from integrating clickstream, outcomes and experiences data together to drive holistic, insightful and actionable recommendations. But I feel that we are on the right direction and I am proud to be a member of this movement in the company. […]

[…] Let's start with what constitutes the main vision: the concept of Trinity. The basic idea is that audience measuring tools (Google Analytics, Omniture…) do not report what is going on. So many visitors view these pages, clicked on these links, stayed on the page that long … But why did they do so? In addition, do these behaviors indicate a success or failure with reference to our goals and viewers' intents? We're missing upstream and downstream data. The concept of Trinity's ambition is to figure out what viewers do, why they do it, and whether they do it successfully. […]

[…] I thought it was about time Web Analytics got a marketing-like-named framework (so far we had Trinity). Here is something lighter you can use to explain your job, pitch a prospect and also as an initial analysis strategy. […]

[…]
Heuristic Evaluations are basically any non-data driven experimentation done to learn, discover, or solve problems. These types of experimentations are a key component of Avinash Kaushik’s “Trinity” concept, a web analytics approach that goes beyond basic clickstream data. This type of learning and problem solving allows you to enter the mind of the user, the reason behind your website, and can unlock terms that simple data based research my have left hidden.
[…]

[…]
We’re having a bit of a measurement week here at Media Bullseye, with running a post from Jason Falls on this same subject yesterday, today I noticed this excellent offering from Kami Huyse. Kami covers the three essentials of measuring social media: interest, actions, and attitudes. “Sticking with things that are musical, when I talk about which things are measurable I break out my Triad of Measurement analogy (which is adapted from Avinash Kaushik’s strategic concept of Trinity and Katie Paine’s idea of measuring Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes).”
[…]

[…]
One thing I’m really hoping to see from this conference, and in the next 3-6 months – as Google steps deeper into the social media space, Google Analytics does a much better job of integrating data from social media and mobile users. But I’m not overly hopeful – although GA has gotten to be a enterprise depth Analytics product over the years, the pace of innovation outside of Clickstream metrics in the product has been pretty slow.
[…]

[…]
The second step was to understand the usage behavior and all the other attributes of each main category (the reason of using the service) which you cannot find on the database. So we started preparing a comprehensive survey – you gotta love the trinity approach of Analytics by Avinash: find the ‘what’ aspect from your revenue, database and bottom-line, find the ‘how’ from all your web analytics and CRM information and find the ‘why’ aspect by simply asking the customer.
[…]

[…] The first two chapters are a great introduction to the world of web analytics – the evolution and different methods of data collection – great for those building up their knowledge from ground zero. Author in this book talks much about Trinity mindset – a framework for creating a sustainable web analytics strategy (more about Trinity mindset in author's blog post). […]

[…]
Go to the blogs I mentioned above and start reading. In fact, you can start with my favorite post of all time. If you start in the right place, it makes it much easier.
Ask your leadership team about their vision for the website, what they hope to accomplish with their emails and other communications, and what they hope an “intranet” will do. In other words listen first.
[…]

[…]
Focus on Actionable Insights – Who are you trying to get to your web pages and what are you trying to get them to do? Without specific analytics objectives, you will likely find yourself diving down the data rabbit hole becoming overwhelmed with all sorts of statistics that don't really matter. From there, you'll likely draw all sorts of false assumptions. Stick to Avinash's Trinity: A Mindset & Strategic Approach
[…]

[…]
Customer Champions are the best tool you have at finding and solving problems in the buying (goal achieving) process. I'm not dumbing down the importance of good analysis, customer surveys and the like. What I am saying is that the people closest to your customers can become great analysts, customer surveys and the like. I want to encourage customer champions to see how their direct access and insights can effect how well a company performs. Get them into this mindset!
[…]

[…]
Read more about it here. Maybe you will get some inspirations in setting up clear goals for your business and understand the nature and the way KPIs should be set up for a web-based business. Another way to think about KPIS is to ask yourself why does your website exists?
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